Sunday, 6 March 2011

Obvious In Hindsight

John Seavey does a good job of briefly breaking down the Republican field for the 2012 presidential elections. I thought it worth pointing out mainly because he sees something I'd missed, and I'm not sure how I did:

[Palin's] going to make a token run, because she’s an utter fame-whore and she only has two ways to get on the media’s radar now that she’s no longer an actual politician, and criticizing Obama for everything he says or does is starting to get stale. Running for President extends the timer on her fifteen minutes of fame, but she doesn’t have the organizational skills, establishment connections, or real desire for a sustained run. Expect her to drop out the first time she loses a primary, citing negative remarks about her and a need to protect her children from the harshness of a political campaign.

I've been saying for a long time now that there's no chance Palin will run, despite increasing evidence to the contrary, because it's so thoroughly clear that it's a job she absolutely doesn't want. The fact she has no interest in responsibility hardly distinguishes amongst big-name Republicans, but more unusually she shows no interest in power either, except insofar as it gets her access to what she does want, which is fame and attention.

As Seavey notes, though, while that continues to mean that there is no chance of her trying to become president, that doesn't prevent her from running for president (though her massively inflated opinion of herself might mean she'd be unable to distinguish the two: if she ran, how could she not win?). Once you realise the difference, a presidential run becomes much more likely, and perhaps even inevitable.

All of which means that the only point on which Seavey could be mistaken is the assumption she'll bow out when she loses her first primary. It's by no means unlikely, but I think it would be safer to predict that she'll bow out at the exact moment that people start to lose interest in her campaign, and/or the questions she fields from the media stop being variations on "Do you really think you can win?" and start being variations on "Just how fucked are you right now?"